


Postmodern Prometheus

by orphan_account



Category: 50 States of Fright
Genre: Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Necrophilia, but i probably shouldn't NOT tag it with it, canon typical bad depictions of taxidermy, canon typical supernatural absurdity, tagging this with necrophilia feels a bit extreme
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23877607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: A deer she'd not been able to get the teeth right on had its mouth realigned. The lips, which had been pulled back, were closed, the toothy sneer re-rendered as something neutrally serene. The accompanying note was perched between its ears.Prey animals shouldn't look like they're about to rip your throat outMegan frowned in distaste at that one."Okay, that's just rude…"
Relationships: Megan Bloom/Sebastian Klepner
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

It took a while for Megan to even notice anything was going on. An embarrassingly long time actually. 

Though it was sort of understandable, given the state her workshop tended to be in. Megan would be the first to admit that she wasn't the world's most organised person - it was to be expected after all, a lot of creative and artistic spirits such as herself weren't. She was forever losing things; her keys, her glasses, Mrs Stewart's cat that one time… She didn't have the clearest idea of where exactly she'd left stuff most of the time, so things not being where they should be didn't exactly stand out. 

Then of course even when she did start to notice things moving around, and thought maybe she was going crazy, at least it was a good kind of crazy. She'd go home of an evening, and come back to find her workshop tidier than she expected it to be. As if perhaps she hadn't actually left it in as chaotic a state as she'd thought. 

She'd never been the best at the whole 'clean as you go' deal, not when she really got into her work - it was always so much easier to just keep everything to hand, even if that resulted in tangled threads and brushes lost irreparably to dried glue. But perhaps she'd been unconsciously putting things back where they belonged, auto pilot finally kicking in after all these years to get her to actually replace the lids on jars and mop up spills. She'd had a lot more work since what happened to Sebastian, about twice as many customers as before coming in with dubious looks on their faces as they clutched potential hunting trophies or departed pets. It was understandable she'd be getting a bit overtired and forgetful. 

Then she started getting the notes. 

She discovered the first one when she was working on a raccoon. Cute little guy, even if the limb positioning was giving her trouble and making him look a touch on the zombified side. She'd decided to abandon that aspect for a while, and come back to it when she was feeling more inspired, turning her focus to the face, and specifically the eyes. Little, beady windows to the raccoon's rascally little soul. 

She kept her supply of glass eyes in the top drawer of her work desk, which was only two inches deep and divided into small, square sections with a baize lining. She'd honestly had good intentions, at one point, about keeping them all separated in pairs into their own sections. Along the way she knew they'd become muddled up, carelessly strewn through the drawer so the different colours mixed up with each other, not to mention sizes and pupil styles. Blues and browns, yellows, reds, slitted feline pupils and rectangular goat eyes… 

Which when she opened the drawer were all neatly paired up and organised. 

"What the heck…" 

She pulled the drawer all the way out, revealing a folded piece of paper about half way back, stained at the edges and torn from her own ledger. 

_Keep them in pairs or you'll never get them to match properly._

The letters were shaky but heavy handed, as though written by someone without much control fine motor control but a whole lot of determination. 

Her fingers shook as she held the paper, and she dropped it back into the drawer. She slammed it shut, as if doing that would keep whoever wrote it locked away, and looked around frantically for anyone who might be watching her. 

But she was alone. 

No one there but her own creations. Deer, foxes, pheasants, fish… A creatively ambitious but not terribly convincing jackalope that she was nonetheless very fond of… 

And in the corner, her greatest work. 

She slumped down in her chair, feeling stupid for panicking and smiling sheepishly. 

"Did you see anyone, Sebastian?" 

The still figure of Sebastian Klepner remained silent on his plinth, glass eyes staring into the middle distance behind his tortoiseshell glasses, as they had done since she'd first set him up there when she'd finished working on him. But, looking at him then, there was something different. 

She took off her own glasses and cleaned them on her blouse, carefully avoiding the smears of blood and preserving agents on her work apron. She got to her feet, and stepped closer to the plinth, reaching out and stopping just short of brushing her fingers against the stitches in Sebastian's cheek. 

The eyes she'd given him hadn't matched. Time had been of the essence when she'd been working on him, which tended to be the case when the subject was severely damaged or didn't have fur to compensate for degradation in the skin, indeed both as had been the case with Sebastian. Getting the job done had seemed more important at the time than searching for a matched pair, and she'd found _one_ that was the right shade of intense brown. She'd thought it added to his charm, and people had always said he was a little odd in life - why not let that be reflected in him looking a little odd in death? 

But they weren't odd anymore. 

Instead of the right eye being deep, dark brown and the left a brighter blue, they were a matched set of brown. The crusted smear of yellowish glue she'd been unable to get rid of from the thin, delicate skin under the left was gone, and with both eyes the same size and shape, the left eyelid was fitted neatly over the convex curve of the glass. 

She didn't realise she was backing away from him until she backed right into her own chair, which scraped loudly against the tiles and drew a startled scream from her. 

"Jesus!" she clutched her chest, fingers curling against her apron. She spun on her heel, waiting for someone, something, to pop out of the shadows at her, "Whoever's doing this, it isn't funny!" 

She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes, deep breaths to calm down. She was being stupid - obviously if someone was pulling a prank this elaborate on her they weren't going to just hide out in the workshop waiting to jump out like a jack-in-the-box. 

She thought about calling the police, but really, what was she going to tell them? That someone had been in her workshop and _tidied up_? Had broken in to fix one of her projects? 'Broken in' probably wasn't even the right word for it, legally speaking. There wasn't anything broken, no muddy footprints in the doorway, no forced locks or latches. The cops would think she was wasting their time, or maybe that she was cracking up. Even in Oregon, prime hunting and trapping country, you got the odd person who thought you had to be a bit funny in the head to even be a taxidermist. 

And this whole thing, whatever it was, wasn't exactly an argument against that. After all, judging by what they'd said and done it sounded like her mystery intruder was a taxidermist themselves, if not by profession then at least a keen amateur. Some unknown rival maybe, who was jealous that she’d taken over so much of Sebastian’s old client base along with his legacy. They definitely had some skill to have reset his eye so carefully, even if the thought of someone else working on him made her seethe a little. 

She'd been the one who found him. She'd been his most devoted fan, the one to preserve his memory and legacy. Why did anyone think they had the right to touch him, he was _hers_ … 

“Whoever it was, they’re not getting in again,” she stepped back up to the plinth, and smoothed down the front of Sebastian’s apron, body solid and unmoving with clay and stuffing beneath her hands. “They can look but they can’t touch, I promise.”

Not that he responded of course.

That night she made extra sure to lock the door, which she admittedly didn’t always, her shop being so remote and far from the main town. She double checked the window latches and the seals around them, and hoped that would be the end of it. That whoever was messing with her would be put off by the care taken with security, and content to have given her a good scare just the once.

But that first letter was just the beginning of it.

Over the next few days, things started moving and changing in the shop more blatantly overnight. The thing of it was, it was still in the strangest ways that weren't strictly speaking threatening. Not enough that Megan felt she could really bother the police with it, and the longer it went on the more it felt like calling the police would be letting this jerk win, somehow.

They kept wanting to give her advice, for some reason. To tidy things up and make alterations to old projects.

A mounted fish that had come to her with a badly damaged tail, which she'd sewn up with thick black thread resulting in an almost industrial, Frankenstein-esque look, was restitched. The suture lines were covered over with individually placed scales. It was precise, delicate work. 

That precision was matched by neater handwriting than before on the second note, this one perched like a place card atop the fish's back. 

_Sew from the inside, not the outside, and patch from areas that won't be seen._

The raccoon she'd been working on changed positions in the night, no longer looking stiff and upright but like it was foraging curiously. In fact it appeared to be looking with some interest at the note left in front of it.

_Use photo references for poses._

The day after that, a deer she'd not been able to get the teeth right on had its mouth realigned. The lips, which had been pulled back, were closed, the toothy sneer re-rendered as something neutrally serene. The accompanying note was perched between its ears. 

_Prey animals shouldn't look like they're about to rip your throat out._

Megan frowned in distaste at that one.

"Okay, that's just rude…" 

If this person was going to invade her shop and move her stuff around without permission, then they didn't need to be so blunt about it. Whether they were right or not wasn't really the point.

The final straw came the next day, when she opened the workshop to find a more elaborate tableau set up by her mystery nitpicker than usual.

The spools of thread she used to stitch up specimens were laid out in a row across the workbench, ordered by colour from clear through to black. Or at least the neutral colours were laid out that way; a spectrum of whites, creams and browns that had only made up a small section of her collection. The brighter, more 'fun' colours, red's and blues and pinks, had been unspooled and dumped into the wire wastebasket, which had in turn been placed on top of the desk. The customary note was propped up against it. 

_Why do you even_ _have_ _these colors?_

Megan crumpled the note in her hand, a surge of petulant anger bringing a flush to her cheek. She tossed the note into the bin, where it was cradled by the tangle of coloured thread like an egg in a nest. 

"Whoever's doing this really needs to mind their own business," she said, turning towards Sebastian with her hands on her hips. She was ready to go on a bit of a rant to her silent audience, when her breath caught in her throat.

Her 'visitor' had made more adjustments to Sebastian's face.

The bright, ice cream sprinkle flecks of colour that had threaded through the stitches in his cheek were gone. In their place, thin, near transparent fibres, the edges neat and even, stretched and tucked in to give a smooth line on the surface. 

She did touch him this time. Traced the pattern of stitches with her fingers, like finding a route on a road map. The surface of his skin was still paper dry, but she could almost imagine he felt warmer than usual, more like a person than an object. She'd put it down to the heat of the sun, if she hadn't deliberately stood him in a shaded corner in the hopes of shielding him from the elements. 

She drew her hand back, and for a moment imagined a flash of annoyance in the glass of his eyes. That tightly wound anger she saw so often when he was alive. 

And God she was angry too.

That night, on closing up the workshop, Megan took the initiative to go a little further than just locking up. With spare planks of wood usually used to create mounting boards, she boarded up the door from the outside, nailing it securely shut with boards across the top, middle and bottom. Sure, she would have to break back in herself when she came in the next day, but lets see how brave her fussy little friend was once they couldn't just pick the lock or whatever it was they were doing any more. If nothing else, if they did come calling, she'd have a good, non crazy, non time wasting reason to call the police and be done with this once and for all. 

She wiped the sweat from her brow, and planted her hands on her hips, feeling accomplished.

"How'd you like them apples, hmm?" she looked in through the window at Sebastian, just visible in the furthest, darkest corner, and couldn't resist giving him a little wave and blowing him a kiss.

"No one's getting to you tonight, sweetheart..."

That night, she fell into a deep, sound sleep, confident that one way or another this would be over by morning. The sound of the wind in the trees outside a wordless lullaby as she drifted off, snug in her pyjamas and under layers of crocheted blankets and ever comforting patchwork quilts.

The antique clock on her walk had not long struck two in the morning when the sounds of movement filtered into her sleep addled brain.

The sounds of her front door opening. Of boots on the wooden staircase, the creak of the loose floorboard just outside her bedroom.

The scrape of the door against the carpet as it swung open.

A figure stood silhouetted in her doorway, the hallway lamp picking out a shock of dark hair, lines of scarring down its cheek, and a glint of light off one glassy eye.

And when it spoke, its voice was familiar, but as dry as sawdust and baked clay. Spoken through lips that had been torn and a tongue superglued back in place.

“I hope you’ve got better at stitching since last time.”


	2. Chapter 2

Megan was having a nightmare.

That was the only explanation she could accept for what was happening. She’d been under a lot of stress, and heck, maybe this was her mind finally properly processing the trauma of finding the dismembered body of a man she’d deeply admired.

It was even following the pattern of dreams she’d had before in a twisted sort of way… Not that she’d ever admit to having had those particular dreams, which had always ranged from good to _very good_.

She tried pinching herself on the arm, and ouch, yes that hurt. She could feel a cold draft, the scape of her nails as she clutched tight to her arm in a growing panic, hear the rattling of her window in the wind… It was too real to be a dream.

The figure in the doorway stepped forward, a little stiffly, one leg seeming less mobile than the other. Out of the light from the hallway, Megan could actually see less details in its face; just a dark outline getting closer, the scuff of boots on bare wood and the vibration through her bedframe from the floorboards. She pulled her blanket up tight around herself, up to her eyes like a child scared of the monster in her closet. 

The figure reached out, and she squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the moment it strangled her or sliced her throat open or any number of other horrible things… Only to hear the gentle click of her bedside lamp, her vision going red as light bled through her eyelids, and Sebastian’s voice speaking her name in a tone that was less murderously foreboding and more… Exasperated?

“Megan…”

She opened her eyes, and recoiled in horror. She shifted back until she felt the headboard rattle against the wall, blankets still grasped tightly against her chest, as she came face to stitched up face with the reanimated body of Sebastian Klepner.

She’d seen him up close before, even closer while she’d been working on him, under the skin and grotesquely intimate. But that was no preparation for having him loom over her, body mobile and expression thunderous. For seeing a mouth that wasn’t connected to muscles or tendons open and hearing a voice come from a throat that had no airway.

“You need to fix the stitches in my neck.”

She blinked, dumbfounded.

“...What?” her voice was a fear paralysed croak.

His mouth pressed into a frown, a little gap on one side where the stitches cut into the line of his lips, and when he spoke again it was slowly. It wasn’t particularly clear whether that was a mechanical issue or because he thought she was stupid.

“I know you misaligned my hairline, I saw it in the mirror, and I can feel…” he reached behind his neck with a grimace, fingers stopping just short of his neck “It’s all jagged. But, I’ve got reduced motion and I can’t reach to fix it, so you’ll have to do it.”

A flush of indignation brought her out of her panic induced stupor, though thankfully that also gave her the presence of mind not to start arguing back against the walking corpse that was criticising her work.

“You’re not here to kill me?”

This time he definitely looked like he thought she was stupid.

“Why would I be here to kill you?”

She loosened her death grip on the blankets to fumble on the table for her glasses, trying to feel a little less exposed.

“I don’t know! You’re a… I don’t know what you are, a zombie? A… ghoul?” the words sounded absurd coming out of her mouth, but then everything about this that wasn’t terrifying was absurd, “You’re a dead man standing over my bed in the middle of the night looking furious with me!”

The scowl on Sebastian’s face faltered at that, and he almost looked sheepish, pulling back from her apologetically like it hadn’t even occurred to him how terrifying he looked. He sat down on the edge of her bed, at a more reasonable distance this time.

He was still close enough though that Megan could feel how cold air seemed to roll off him, and the scent of pine; like when you first bring a Christmas tree into your house and until it settles it’s very much a chilly piece of the forest you’ve invited into your home.

He must have walked down the side of the hill to her house, through the trees down to the back road that led practically to her door. 

Her door which she had locked up before going to bed.

“Did you break into my house?”

Sebastian looked at her, gaze flat, even for a man with two glass eyes.

“Oh I’m sorry,” he said, deadpan, “Was that a violation of your personal space and autonomy? Interesting how that didn’t come up when you decided to go to my workshop, steal my remains, stitch me back together and put me on display in your shop.”

Megan sat up, spluttering defensively

“You were dead, you… You _are_ dead!” she gestured to his whole self, and he set his hands on his hips, as though trying to prove a point with the motion. His eyes flashed darkly, and she shrank back a little under it, her voice sounding small and pathetic to her own ears, “I didn’t think you’d mind…”

His face scrunched up, pulling at the stitches in his hairline, and his voice was a vicious hiss.

“You think I wanted to be a _sideshow attraction_ in that _house of horrors_ you call a workshop?” he flung an arm out in the rough direction of the hill, and looked even more angry that his elbow didn’t straighten all the way. He rubbed at it with his other hand with a frustrated sigh, “How did you even get away with this?”

“Well, no one else came to claim your body so…”

He held up a finger to silence her.

“No, no, that part I understand. That I would have been grateful for, if that’s all you did,” his hands dropped back into his lap, and he fidgeted agitatedly with a rough edge down the side of his index finger, “What I want to know is how you got away with displaying a human corpse, in full view of the public.”

Megan squirmed a little, embarrassed by the truth, but with no other explanation to offer. 

“No one thought you were real. They thought you were a dummy or a sculpture.” It had bothered her at first, that people apparently thought her work on Sebastian was unconvincing, but given time to think about it rationally she had come to see it as a bit of a blessing in disguise. It wasn't _strictly_ legal what she'd done after all. 

Sebastian huffed, rolling his eyes. 

“Well, you did make me look like a Halloween decoration so that figures.”

“Look, I wouldn’t have done it if anyone had raised any objections. But I don’t know if you had any family…"

He cut her off with a sharp, sudden raise of his hand. Not a violent gesture but an emphatic one. She stopped, biting the inside of her lip, quite aware in that moment that that had been the second time she’d brought up his apparent lack of a family, or even real friends to claim him after he died. That whatever her intentions were, and however she felt about _him_ , he was hardly her biggest fan and yet at the end of his life she’d been all he had… That had to be salt in the wound.

His fingers curled into a loose fist, trembling a little.

"Can you do me a favour and stop saying 'had', and 'were', like I'm not here talking to you right now?”

And of course she hadn’t even thought about that. It had been so easy to get caught up in how bizarre and scary this had all been for her, she hadn’t considered how it must have felt from Sebastian’s side. He’d died, a horrible, violent death, and it seemed like the peace and rest that were the compensation for that were off the table.

“I’m sorry,” she said, gently, reaching out and patting his shoulder, a safer bet than his hand with the protection of his shirt. “Do you still want me to help with your neck?”

He looked down at her hand like it was a spider that had crawled onto him, but after a moment he nodded, getting to his feet. Megan started to pull back her layers of blankets, before a flash of brightly coloured fleece reminded her of what exactly she was wearing. 

“I’m in my pyjamas.”

He gave her another flat look. 

“You put my intestines in a bucket.”

That did, in fairness, shake up the concept of social boundaries a bit.

Still feeling rather self conscious in her fleecy pyjamas (replete with moons and cows jumping over them, emphatically not something she had really ever wanted Sebastian in particular to see her in), Megan dragged the full length mirror from the corner of her room over to her dressing table, along with a wicker armchair to accompany the stool that was already there. That way, not only could they see each other while she worked on the back of his neck, but he could see what she was doing, as judging from the passive aggressive notes she was sure he’d have things to say about it. Because of course he'd been leaving the notes, in retrospect she should have recognised the tone... 

He sank down onto the stool, stiffly, and pulled a spool of clear thread from the pocket of his apron, a needle speared through the top. He also pulled out a curved set of scissors, and gestured with them for her to sit.

She took the scissors from him as she sat, and steeling herself, carefully began snipping through the threads at the back of his neck, one hand braced on his shoulder. She wasn’t squeamish, that wasn’t a character trait a professional taxidermist could afford to have, but that didn’t stop it from being unnerving as all get out to have the subject she was working on shift and move under her hands. She pulled the edge of the skin taut, and folded it over, matching it to another fold on the opposite section before picking up the needle and thread and starting to restitch. Sebastian twitched a little as the needle pierced his skin, and she stopped for a second.

“Does it hurt?”

“No. It feels… strange. It isn’t exactly numb, I can feel what you’re doing, but it’s not painful.”

“That’s a mercy I suppose. What about when you…” she mimed popping out her own eye.

“That was even stranger, but no. I couldn’t see through that eye when the old glass was out, but I could again when I put the new one in, even though it’s opaque,” he held up his hand, waving it back and forth in front of the newer eye, and she could see it shift, tracking the movement, “I don’t even know how it’s doing that, there’s no muscles under there.”

“There’s no muscles anywhere else in your body and you still managed to walk. You don’t even have a brain, or a heart…”

Sebastian huffed a bitter laugh.

“Fantastic. I’m the scarecrow _and_ I’m the tin man.”

A thought of trying to compare herself to Dorthy crossed Megan’s mind, but it brought with it a memory of the line _‘I think I’ll miss you most of all’_ , and that was a dangerous path to send herself down.

“How long has this been happening?” she asked, eager to divert the conversation a little, “The moving around like this…”

“The moving is relatively new,” he said, moving things around on her dresser and putting them into neat rows, “I was… aware of things for a while before I could do anything. I remember dying, I feel like I know some of what happened afterwards, flashes of how you found me and put me back together, but I wasn’t awake and aware until a while afterwards.”

He glanced up, eyes meeting hers in the glass. 

“I can only move at night, but I can see and hear all the time”

She grimaced in embarrassment. 

“So all the times I talked to you, or talked to myself..?”

She trailed off, waiting for him to say something cutting. But to her surprise, he gave her an honest to goodness smile.

And God it churned her up inside that even like this, seeing him smile at her gave her a little flutter in her heart.

“I talked to my subjects all the time, and to myself, it’s fine… I could have done without you singing along to The Bangles on the radio though.”

She gave a surprised laugh, and swatted him on the back of the shoulder.

“Excuse you, Eternal Flame is a classic!”

“Yes, which you butchered!”

And for the first time in years, almost since they first met, he didn’t sound annoyed or frustrated with her. He sounded like he had back when she’d hoped they could be friends…

She finished the last stitch, carefully tying and tucking the end of the thread so it didn’t stick out.

“All done. How does that feel?”

He shifted his head, the change in angle and the way the skin had been stretched letting him bend it forward a little further, and this time when he reached back, his fingertips could just brush over the join.

“Better,” he got to his feet, turning to face her, “Why couldn’t you have done it like that the first time?”

“Well I was kind of in a hurry,” she planted her hands on her hips, “If I’d taken too much time I didn’t know if you were going to deteriorate completely.”

He sighed, though it lacked the undertone of seething anger it had had before.

“If you’re going to do something there’s no point if you don’t at least try to do it to the best of your…”

Megan’s brow furrowed as he stopped mid word.

“Sebastian?”

She squinted up at him, and gave his shoulder a gentle prod.

Solid, unmoving. Inanimate.

She stepped back from him, and looked towards her window. Towards the cool blue light of dawn that was filtering through the curtains.

“Darn it…”

She turned back to Sebastian, looking searchingly into his dark glass eyes.

“How the heck am I gonna get you back down the stairs?”

**Author's Note:**

> People making terrible decisions is integral to the 50 States of Fright universe


End file.
